Chapter 5
From the rotunda, Reid squinted at a group of security guards gathered just inside the entrance to the Hall of Mammals. He crouched down with the boy beside him, both of them seeking cover behind the woolly mammoth as their eyes followed the movements of the guards. Reid wondered what the smugglers wanted with the stuffed animals.
Among all the exhibits at the National Museum of Natural History, the stuffed animals were Reid's favorite. The stuffed animals were taxidermied specimens of mammals, common and rare, posed in natural postures - the lioness attacking the wildebeest, the panther on the prowl, the leopard lazing over the tree branch. The felines were the fiercest, but the giraffe, with its longs legs splayed out and its long neck stretched out as it drank from a watering hole, was the specimen that most illustrated the extremes to which nature would go in its quest to thrive. In the wild, the zebra and the antelope took the cue of the giraffe. When the giraffe spotted danger from up high, it fled, and that was the sign for the zebra and the antelope to flee as well.
The security guards, the same three who had stolen the Eoraptor fossil, wheeled a cart through the Hall of Mammals towards the Hall of Human Origins. Reid followed, finding himself drawn, against his will, to the illicit, but fascinating, activities. He didn't need his gut to tell him that another act of grand theft/larceny was about to take place.
At the entrance to the Hall of Human Origins, Reid paused, considering his options. The wise choice was to flee the area and continue his search for Jack and Henry among the exhibits on the opposite side of the rotunda. The other choice was to attack the security guards with the arthropods, until the despicable specimens of basest humanity were reduced to writhing wriggling masses of living de-evolution. The choice was no choice at all. It was a prerogative.
Just like they had done when they had stolen the Eoraptor fossil, the security guards unlocked a glass display case and lifted out the priceless fossil within. The fossil was a hominid skull, brown and cracked with age, smaller than any human skull had any right to be. It was an Australopithecus skull, from a bipedal hominid species that had appeared in eastern Africa more than 4 million years ago. The genus Australopithecus had radiated into both gracile and robust species before its extinction 2 million years ago. One of those robust species had spawned the genus Homo, which included Homo sapiens sapiens, Man wise wise, although not every specimen of the species fit the nominal description. As the security guards replaced the real deal with a nearly identical replica, Reid experienced an irrepressible urge to extract their skulls from their bodies and stick their giant empty brain casings into glass display cases for public ridicule.
Before he could act upon his murderous intentions, Reid felt a tugging at his sleeve. Looking down, he found Jason pointing at the creepy-crawly box of horrors under his arm. He checked the arthropods. To his relief, there were still thirteen cockroaches, one scorpion, one tarantula, and five mantises. The pregnant scorpion had not yet hatched its scorplings, nor had the scorpion or the tarantula consumed any of the cockroaches, nor had any of the mantises consumed any of the other mantises. The ecosystem was intact.
"I've got an idea," Jason whispered, pulling Reid away from the wide arched doorway. "There's three of them this time, so we have to be extra careful. Let's wait for one of the bad guys to wander away from the others. When he's alone, we can sic the scorpion on him. The scorpion hasn't seen any action yet. I think it's getting restless," he pointed at the scorpion box, where the ebony arachnid curled and uncurled its tail in preparation for the birth of its scorplings.
"Good idea, Jason," Reid nodded in approval. "Divide and conquer, a proven military tactic for engaging large enemy forces, an algorithmic approach in computer science to...Never mind," he stopped himself.
"What? An algorithmic approach to...what?" Jason asked.
"I'll tell you all about it later," Reid replied.
"Promise?" Jason asked.
"Promise," Reid replied. "Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a needle in my eye."
Jason nodded solemnly in acceptance of the promise. He plucked the scorpion out of its box and let the creature crawl up his forearm. Together, the man and the boy peeked around the corner into the Hall of Human Origins. To their delight, two of the security guards had disappeared out of sight, leaving only the tall gangly one to gaze at a wall of hominid skulls arranged into the human evolutionary tree. The enemy target scratched his head like a chimpanzee as he mouthed out the Latin names on the placards.
"Let's get him," Reid whispered to Jason.
Jason stooped down to the floor and unleashed the scorpion. The scorpion wavered, uncertain of its mission until it noticed the security guard across the room. The guard, with his tall gangly stature, reminded the scorpion of someone else, who had ducked out of sight with the express purpose of directing the scorpion towards the guard rather than himself.
At a gentle nudge from the boy, the scorpion skittered over the marble floor. It crawled onto one foot of the security guard, resting briefly before grasping the khaki fabric of the man's pants and pulling itself up the pant leg. The guard did not notice anything horribly amiss until the scorpion reached his thigh, where it stopped, hanging onto the pant leg with one claw while pinching the flesh of a skinny hand with the other. The guard winced, letting out a startled shriek as he grabbed his hand. Being an entomophobe, the sight of the huge scorpion immediately sent him into a fear-induced panic attack. He flung his arm this way and that, trying to shake off the scorpion that had jumped from his leg to his hand. The easiest way to remove the scorpion would have been to pluck it right off its perch, but the guard was so afraid of arthropods that he refused to touch them, not even to remove them from his own body. He was ill-adapted for life in the wild.
After several minutes of arthropod-inflicted torture, Reid, remembering his own anxiety disorders concerning darkness, human females, and human females in the darkness, took pity upon the enemy. Leaving Jason in the Hall of Mammals, Reid strode calmly towards the security guard. With his thumb and index finger, he plucked the scorpion off the man's shoulder, where it had burrowed halfway into the man's shirt. The man fled the scene, covering his mouth and stumbling into a nearby restroom to void himself of his dinner. Reid looked after him for a second, considered following him into the restroom to handcuff him to the pipes, but decided against it when he realized that the sight of the scorpion would send the man into another panic attack. The man had suffered enough. Reid hoped that as a consequence of the experience, the young man would reform himself and swear off thievery of any kind.
He returned to the Hall of Mammals, where Jason greeted him with a low five in one hand and the scorpion box in the other. Into the box went the scorpion, who resumed its earlier activities, curling and uncurling its tail, content to relax in the company of its attentive caretakers after its thrilling rollercoaster ride.
"The rest of them are gone," Reid said. "Let's go find Jack and Henry," he led the boy through the Hall of Human Origins towards its intersection with the Ocean Hall.
As he strolled past the hominid exhibits, Reid reflected on the evolution of the human brain. He wondered if humans, with all their powers of intelligence, were really no different from the other animals. He himself was a clear example. He was one of the smartest of his kind, and yet, he could not resist his basic animal instincts - stalking, hunting, killing, albeit using harmless arthropods. In this time of crisis, while Jack and Henry were missing in the museum, Reid was deeply ashamed of himself for letting his animal instincts subsume his better judgment. He vowed to resist the urges, as soon as he finished employing the arthopods one final time in the Ocean Hall.
In the Ocean Hall, under the replica of the North Atlantic right whale, two corrupt security guards argued over what to steal next. One of them, the short skinny one, wanted to steal the head of Basilosaurus cetoides, a 60-foot long marine reptile that was the oceanic equivalent of Tyrannosaurus rex. The other, the tall hulking one, wanted to steal the humongus jawbone of Carcharodon megalodon, a 70-foot shark that would have given the basilosaur a run for its money had the basilosaur not gone extinct 10 million years before the shark had evolved and 35 million years before the shark had also gone extinct. The guards argued vociferously in the large cavernous space, their voices echoing off the walls, their words scrambled up in the echoes. Reid couldn't make out exactly what they were saying, but from their behavior, he could tell that they were two of the most undeserving of their taxonomic designation. They imagined that they could pilfer two gigantic fossil skeletons without anyone noticing.
"What are we going to do about them?" Jason asked, tilting his head in the direction of the knuckleheads.
"We're going to unleash all our forces," Reid smiled into the box.
The cockroaches, scorpion, tarantula, and mantises gazed up in unison at the smiling man. In his imagination, they saluted, their animal instincts uniting with his own against the odious graverobbers. As usual, the cockroaches volunteered to take point.
Reid set the cockroach box on the floor near the giant squid exhibit. At his signal, Jason tipped the box over, sending the cockroaches on their way up the pant legs of the security guards. From a distance, Reid couldn't tell how the cockroach army had distributed itself between the two enemy targets. He could only see the short skinny guard screaming and flailing while the tall hulking guard watched in horror, indicating that the cockroaches had chosen to divide and conquer the enemy rather than allowing themselves to be divided and conquered by the enemy.
As a reward for their initiative, Reid dispatched auxiliary forces to aid them. He released the mantises, crossing his fingers and toes that the large green gangling creatures would attack the guard instead of the roaches. Mantises were known to devour everything under the sun, including other mantises, even when free from the intoxicating effects of sexual arousal.
The mantises dashed across the floor with astonishing speed. Speed was their main predatory adaptation. In the wild, they latched onto their prey extraordinarily quickly, usually from an ambush position behind the foliage. In the museum, there was nowhere to hide, so the mantises scattered in all directions from their point of origin. Reid, realizing his mistake, tried to lure the mantises back into the box.
"Here, manty, manty, manty..." Reid whispered while circling the mantises.
"Here, manty, manty, manty..." Jason whispered while blocking off their escape routes.
It didn't work. None of the mantises displayed the slightest interest in returning to their habitat. The operation hung at the precipice, until Reid remembered the bottle of reproductive pheromones. He snatched it out of the box, squirted some of the contents at his feet, and watched in satisfaction as the mantises followed the siren song of psychoactive chemicals. Slowly and steathily, Reid squirted a path of pheromones between the giant squid and the large security guard, who had snuck away from his screaming flailing compatriot upon seeing the wingless, but still disgusting, cockroaches. He had snuck away only to meet his own comeuppance at the raptorial forelegs of the mantises.
The mantises attacked with gusto, each of the vividly green females zeroing in on the face of the security guard. Reid darted over, sprayed some reproductive pheromones in the general direction of the guard, darted away, and licked his chops in sadistic pleasure as the females bit chunk after tiny chunk out of the guard's cheeks, mistaking each pimple and zit for the head of a mantis male in their pheromone-induced mating frenzy. During mating, mantis females practiced sexual cannibalism, biting the heads off their dull brown mates to prolong the duration of copulation. Finding no males to copulate with on the face of the security guard, the mantis females practiced their regular predatory behaviors, which included biting the heads off other insects, some of which, being garden pests, were targeted for eradication by human gardeners who acquired mantis egg cases for the express purpose of filling their yards with voracious ambush predators.
After several minutes of team-inflicted torture, Reid decided that it was time for the arthropods to explore their individual identities. He collected the cockroaches and mantises from the prostrate forms of the short skinny and tall hulking guards, respectively. For the short skinny guard, he unleashed Deus Ex Machina, who immediately settled upon the chest of the target to stretch out its long hairy legs. For the tall hulking guard, he unleashed the pregnant scorpion, who immediately settled upon the chest of the target to give live birth to its 15 tiny scorplings.
The scorplings rolled around on the man mountain in a scene that was an inexact facsimile of Lemuel Gulliver's introductory encounter with the Lilliputians. The scorpion clambered to the neck of the man mountain, pinching the man's triple chins with its claws as its scorplings scrambled onto its back. When the scorpion had tasted its fill of the man's subcutaneous adipose stores, it crawled onto the man's face, over his facial features, and through his tangled dreadlocks. From his head, the scorpion leaped nimbly to the floor.
Reid reached out to pick up the scorpion. That was a mistake.
Previously, the scorpion had been enamored with its gallant caretaker. Since giving birth, however, the scorpion had transferred its affections to its scorplings, which it would love and refrain from killing as long as they were tiny, helpless, and unable to fend for themselves. It would only kill them if they continued to mooch off their mother after they had already reached maturity. For now, in the eyes of a new mother, every movement by every object was a threat against the scorplings. That was why, when Reid moved his hand into the visual field of the scorpion, it opened its claws, arched its tail over its back, and stung him in the palm.
The sting, though intensely painful, produced only a small red welt. The venom of the emperor scorpion was low in toxicity, and the scorpion sting would not have produced much in the way of symptoms had it not been for Deus Ex Machina, who, having stretched out its long hairy legs upon one writhing wriggling mass, now desired nothing more than to cuddle up with another writhing wriggling mass of living de-evolution. The tarantula, confused by the odors of mantis reproductive pheromones filling the air, mistook the writhing wriggling mass for an arachnid male. It sank its fangs into the nearby target, hanging on until all its venom had been injected into a pale skinny arm. Fortunately, the venom of the Goliath bird-eating tarantula was low in toxicity. Unfortunately, when the spider venom mixed with the scorpion venom in the bloodstream of the injectee, they reacted to produce a chemical compound that traveled straight to the brain and fell into the welcoming arms of cannabionoid receptors on the cell surfaces of neurons. The cannabinoid receptors happened to be the very same ones that normally bound molecules of tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive compound in marijuana.
Reid felt a wave of euphoric calmness sweep over him as the spider-scorpion venom performed its functions. The pain of the scorpion sting evaporated out of his palm. The pain of the spider bite evaporated out of his arm. The nausea, caused by the shock of being stung and bitten in rapid succession, subsided as the compound exhibited its anti-emetic properties. Like all cannabinoid substances, the spider-scorpion venom was truly magical.
Reid gave Jason a goofy grin as the boy approached to retrieve the arachnids. The arachnids, having exhausted both their energy and venom stores, crawled obediently back into their boxes. The man and the boy walked calmly out of the Ocean Hall, leaving the two security guards to huddle together and commisserate over their common traumatic experiences. Reid hoped that the guards would reform themselves and, like the tall gangly guard in the Hall of Human Origins, swear off thievery of any kind.
Out of the Ocean Hall and into a passageway they walked, the boy leading the way while the man strolled through a warm fuzzy high, much like the one that came from eating a large platter of special brownies. Ten feet into the African Cultures exhibit, the man froze, whipped his head around, remembered something, and scurried back in the direction from which he had come. A minute ago, he had spotted a pair of small moving objects out of the corner of his eye. He had spotted them as he had sauntered past the Discovery Room in an arachnid-induced daze. He remembered that the Discovery Room was full of hands-on exhibits for children to play with. Indeed, at this very moment, children played with the exhibits in the Discovery Room. In the doorway, Reid nearly burst into tears at the sight before him - Jack arranging a pile of meteorites on the floor, Henry licking a plastic replica of JJ's favorite pale-clouded yellow butterfly.
"Jack! Henry!" Reid stumbled through the doorway.
"Uncle Spenny!" Jack rushed over with an iron-nickel meteorite in his hand.
"Spenny cry!" Henry toddled over with his butterfly.
Reid hugged Jack, scooped Jack into his arms, hugged Jack again, set Jack down, scooped Henry into his arms, hugged Henry, and dropped to the floor with Henry in his arms. He felt like a new man, granted a reprieve from a gruesome hanging, drawing, and quartering execution at the hands of Hotch, JJ, and Will dressed up in medieval executioner costumes. In his vision, Hotch was the one who hanged him half to death, while JJ was the one who cut him down from the scaffold, so that Will could eviscerate him and burn his entrails in a copper brazier, as he watched, screamed, and hoped for the respite of death. After death, he would go straight to Hell, where Haley, who had fallen out of Heaven to join forces with Satan, would torture him for all eternity by spooling his brain out through his nostrils, re-constituting the sludgey fragments in a tank, and stuffing the mass back into his head through an opening in his skull.
On his new life, Reid swore never to let the minimans out of his sight again, unless it was to let them into the sight of their biological parents. He had never felt so happy before, his happiness 99% attributable to his reunion with the minimans and only 1% attributable to the cannabinoid substance in his brain.
Jason watched from the doorway, peering in at the joyful scene as he fingered the taser in his pocket. He didn't know what to do. He didn't know how to feel. The scene before him was utterly unfamiliar. He understood none of its pain or joy.
Suddenly, heavy footsteps approached from the direction of the African Cultures. A security guard, the leader of the smuggling ring, appeared in the passage outside the Discovery Room. The guard grabbed the boy roughly by the shoulder. He shoved the boy into the room, so hard that the boy tripped and tumbled over a pile of LEGOs on the floor. The boy skooched backwards into the wall, staring at the man with fear in his eyes.
"You stay here, Boy," the man addressed the boy. "I'll deal with you later, after I finish dealing with him," he drew his government-issued weapon from its holster and pointed it at Reid.
In one swift motion, Reid let go of Jack and Henry, scrambled out of the Discovery Room, and slammed the door shut behind him. He stood with his back against the door, himself the only obstacle between the man and the minimans.
Outside the play room, the keeper faced the man. Inside the play room, the minimans faced the boy. Hours ago, the situations would have been parallel. Now, the situations were orthogonal. Or so Reid hoped. It was not just hope that told him so. It was not even the cannabinoid substance in his brain. It was the profiles - the profile of the boy and the profile of the man.
"Hello Bill," Reid addressed Jason's father, "My name is Spencer."